jdreyer wrote on Oct 30, 2021, 13:44:
If you hit the reply or quote button, scroll down and you will see a checkbox "Email me when this topic is updated." Does that work for you?

Even easier, without posting, is to use the Subscribe Topic button above the thread.

RedEye9 wrote on Oct 30, 2021, 15:11:
Subscribing to a thread only emails you when a post has been added.
If I'm not mistaken,
There are no alerts or emails for the following: "someone edited their post, someone deleted their post, a post was struck down..." etc.

That is correct.

Rigs wrote on Oct 30, 2021, 16:30:
Wait wait wait...full stop. What is this page?! Where am I? I know every single inch of this site, how long has this been here?!?

Only since 2009.

This was a bit more complicated to execute than the simple outcome suggests

Actually, it was just as simple as the outcome: changing one column name in one query. The database always contained two headline fields already: the main one above news stories, and a (usually) shortened variant for the Stories of Note and Popular Threads boxes.
It just took some time (mainly because of activities elsewhere) to get around to it and to test the change for the News and user post indexes, from which I guess Steve inferred it was not so simple.

Ant wrote on Oct 9, 2021, 16:27:
What was the URL to the old Quake's Rag? Maybe it's in http://archive.org?

http://www.panix.com/~sheaslip/
And no, the original site isn't on archive.org, possibly even pre-dates it.

Hyggelik wrote on Aug 19, 2021, 15:54:
The link for this article "Rambus Shares New Details on Upcoming HBM3 Specification." made my ESET pop up a warning. Please use at your own risk.

It makes little sense to post that in General Discussion without link to the original news story. It might be useful to add it to the comments there.

Kxmode wrote on Aug 13, 2021, 12:19:
Whoopsie 🐢

P.S. Stephen, it looks like articles that begin with quotes result in truncated titles (e.g., "Re:").

Come on Kxmode, you of all people (except RedEye9 perhaps ) should know better than to bury a bug report inside a news post discussion. That's what General Discussion is for.

Anyway, the position of the first quote didn't matter, anything after it would be rendered invisible but is still present in the HTML source. It happened in a few hundred threads before, but was less noticeable when the quote only appeared later into the subject. The quotes needed to be escaped into HTML entities - fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up.

This comment was edited on Aug 14, 2021, 10:04.

Pike wrote on Aug 10, 2021, 04:43:
This is the source I get, both links are http (I also checked in Edge to confirm it's not due to any Firefox addons):

<div class="archive-bar gutter-top">
<strong class="archive-link pull-left"><a href="http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/blammo.pl?mode=archive&display=20210806" target="_self">Previous 2 days</a> </strong>
<strong class="archive-link"><a href="http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/blammo.pl?mode=archive" target="_self">News Archive</a></strong>
<strong class="archive-link pull-right"> </strong>
</div>

So no idea what is going on!

Ah, that was surprising indeed. This differed between the static frontpage that users see and a dynamic one I normally use, as the scheme-host part wasn't trimmed off those archive links in some cases. Fixed now, thanks for the report.

Pike wrote on Aug 10, 2021, 01:57:
Really trivial issue here but I have Firefox's https-only mode enabled and get a warning whenever I click "Previous 2 days" or "News Archive" at the bottom of the front page (because these links still use http not https).

There must be another reason because those links (and all local links) do not use the 'scheme://host/' part of the URL, so they cannot deviate from the site default, which is https://www.bluesnews.com/. You can see this in the source (ctrl-U).

Greentiger wrote on Aug 9, 2021, 01:12:
Don't know much about perl (Im a PHP guy) but if he's using the old Frontpage...

Perl and Frontpage are completely unrelated. Data is stored with correct UTF-8 encoding in the database.

Hadn't really spent any serious time on this issue anymore until the past week, when I had some new ideas to investigate the issue. TLDR: I think I found the fix, and Blue and I have not been getting replacement characters displayed for accented characters anymore, in hundreds of refreshes.

Short story longer:
Perl I/O to file handles needs to have UTF-8 encoding set in order to pass through UTF-8 strings correctly. This is done via a pragma: use open ":std", ":encoding(UTF-8)";
This also sets it for standard input & output, the default I/O channels in Unix/Linux. The cgi-bin scripts all print to standard output, and via Apache that gets delivered to the browser. This pragma had been in place since February, but evidently was insufficient to fully get rid of the question marks.

Yesterday I came across a remark that this needs to be done before the stream (file handle) gets opened, otherwise the pragma cannot be applied anymore. Standard output is always opened when a process starts, but it took a while to sink in that this can also happen for cgi-bin scripts invoked by Apache and modperl. So sometimes the pragma works and I/O gets encoded correctly, but in other cases it wouldn't. It can be achieved consistently by another command on the existing, already opened handle: binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)'; (and similarly for STDIN).

So please let me know if you still see accented characters displayed incorrectly, but I have good hopes that the problem is solved. Phew.

stodge wrote on Jun 6, 2021, 16:25:
Is there a way to delete my account on these forums?

Per the privacy policy your personal data can be erased. Mail the request to Blue.

SlimRam wrote on Jun 4, 2021, 00:03:
I heard this fuckin' place existed but have never actively sought it out!

With 1420+ posts in the News forum, you were in "the forums" all this time already.

RedEye9 wrote on May 24, 2021, 17:27:
Possible fix?
https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=222447&id=1314299

Already discussed but it'd be a workaround, not a real solution to the underlying problem.

jdreyer wrote on May 21, 2021, 18:17:
So what's next, will we be able to embed .jpgs?

If you can't express it in Unicode, it better not be expressed here at all.

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 25, 2021, 12:04:
Smillies still show through secret tags though....

Which may or may not be intentional

Both. The tag explicitly is for secret "text", and doesn't actively hide any text but merely renders it in the background color. The smilies are images and therefore cannot be hidden the same way, but also don't really fall under the meaning of text.

Kxmode wrote on Apr 2, 2021, 14:37:
Frans, could you add the stats link to the footer?

Could but won't. It's in the menu, and Blue and I feel it doesn't belong in the footer. Besides, if it were there, then by the same logic the credits & FAQ could go there as well, and that would be too much.

Acleacius wrote on Apr 2, 2021, 13:19:
That's some sleek and sexy coding Frans, what's your secret!

Thanks, no secret: the graph is done by simply feeding Chart.js with settings and data. The month picker took the most time, starting from an existing jQueryUI plugin and fixing/massaging it into shape. We can rebuild it, we have the source code, and it doesn't even cost 6 dollars.

Rhialto wrote on Apr 1, 2021, 13:01:
Yeah where is the pink theme to go along with new logo?

Some theming applied.

NBK_RedSpy wrote on Mar 25, 2021, 20:05:
but just curious why the site only updates at noon eastern.

Only? On weekdays there is a second update in the early evening. But that may be besides your point.

Bent wrote on Mar 18, 2021, 14:35:
Aha, the Contact Blue link gives an email address but the Submit News doesn't.

Send News (in the masthead) or Submit News (in the left menu) use a mailto link which opens a message window with a mail program (e.g. Thunderbird) where that address is already filled in.

I tried something that Google/Chrome is going to require in May, but it isn't quite ready for prime time here. It did reveal a minor configuration oversight on our end though, so that's fixed, but the other changes are postponed.